New Event Monitoring Reviews 2017

In their most recent reviews, users discuss how their organizations have benefitted from the tools they use, discussing topics such as IT infrastructure monitoring capabilities, deployment speed, and scalability.

CA UIM

Scalability, Redundancy, Probes, and Configuration Management

“The features valuable to me are scalability, redundancy, and the wide range of probes available for just about any platform.

Another major advantage is the easy configuration management. When you define standard “base” monitoring templates and on top of those, define “differential” templates, having a tool that allows you to manage these hundreds (and even thousands) of templates in an organized manner is an absolute necessity.”

Advanced-Level Training

“One of the biggest areas to improve would be the training aspect. There's a little bit of training out there available right now. I know it's a newer CA product. I think the training is a little rudimentary at this point. I think there needs to be some more advanced-level training available.”

Ease of Deployment, Configuration, and Extension

“It is easy to deploy and configure, has rich out of the box monitoring capabilities for Windows environments, and can be easily extended with base XML and scripting knowledge.

As any helpful monitoring tool, SCOM improved vision of core problems of the IT environment for the technical support team and helped locate causes faster and consolidated monitoring functions in fewer hands. With some reporting and dashboarding additions, SCOM helped the IT department show its value for business users.”

Size of Footprint

“SCOM agents have a heavy footprint. Would like a lighter, more-efficient footprint. It takes a developer’s mindset to fully utilize SCOM’s potential. I would like easier deployment of MP and custom monitors.”

CA Spectrum

Event Configuration, Event Correlation, and Topology View

“Event Configuration: A tool in its simplest form creates business logic around events. For example, generate an alarm if Event A occurs and if Event B doesn’t occur within 30 seconds. In its hardest form, you can create a custom state machine for very hard business logic.

Event Correlation: Spectrum has out-of-the-box correlation, but with this tool, you can create custom ones. You can make some alarms hide inside another alarm as a symptom, get root cause analysis, and avoid unnecessary notifications/alarms on the screen.

Topology view: The topology diagrams on CA Spectrum look very nice and they are very useful. We stopped using them because with more than 10K devices, the administration was just too painful.

Dynamic models: Integration with the CA Spectrum is awesome. Sending traps with the third-party tools and using the SBG to receive them requires a learning curve. However, once you get it, it is very simple. Unlike another tool, you don’t need to know what the third-party tool is monitoring. In other words, if it sends some data, it will be dynamically created in CA Spectrum.”

User Interface, Enhance Features, and Update Device Certification

“NCM: Needs to be more user-friendly and refined. The ability to quickly see changes across various time configured backups helps to quickly identify changes which could be a root cause to a prevalent problem due to incorrect configurations.

MRTG graphs need to be more intuitive.

The GIS map feature needs to be enhanced and synced with topology views of containers and global collections.

The probable cause database needs to be enhanced.

As Cisco and Alcatel lose out to cheaper competition like Huawei, ZTE, etc., device certifications need to be updated.”

ScienceLogic

Product Coverage and Company Responsiveness

“I see the biggest features of EM7 is that it is can cover a lot of different products very quickly and without a ton of effort. In my book, the second biggest feature is the company behind the product, they generally respond quickly to issues with some level of urgency and they seem very motivated to innovate the software.”

Reporting and User Interface

“Reporting is still a gigantic pain point, we invest a lot of cycles in manufacturing reports off-board - #notfun. While EM7 covers a lot of ground quickly and is capable of consuming enormous amounts of event and performance data, EM7 ironically has a hard time reporting on it - basic reporting is there, but if you let's say want to run a report for the last 90 days how many Cisco 2900 routers had a critical power supply incident that for one isn't easy and two needs a developer to write a custom report.

For me the UI lays out very logically, then again I use it every day, but for many of our users navigating the UI gets confusing quickly and before long the user gets lost and frustrated and they give up. The UI for any end user facing systems needs to welcome all walks of life, EM7 at present (I know they are working on the UI currently) is really geared to the end users who are professional engineers not necessarily the weekender admin - which if you are professional engineer, you're going to feel right at home.”end user facing systems needs to welcome all walks of life, EM7 at present (I know they are working on the UI currently) is really geared to the end users who are professional engineers not necessarily the weekender admin - which if you are professional engineer, you're going to feel right at home.”

HPE Operations Bridge

Event Correlation and Handling

“The most valuable feature is the event correlation and how we handle the events. There are a lot of possibilities and it's a new experience for us. I used to work with IBM. It's another way of working and thinking and it's a revelation for us. It helps us the most with correlations of events and events handling; how we do that in SM9, it is a new way of working for us. I'm very pleased with it.”

Improve Reporting and Stability

“Reporting has to be tackled a bit more. Conceptually, it is there and conceptually it is amazing, but somehow the module itself is suffering. This is one of the issues with stability. The reporting module from HPE is not a very stable module, which is OBR to be very specific.

Not all the modules are very stable, but definitely we know from our practices and operations which ones are stable. Regarding the ones that are not stable, we are constantly having engagements with HPE support, as well as HPE development, to make it more stable.”

4 Comments

I use an online tool SMTPViewer.com for all my events. No ower crowded dashboards with stats all over the place. Just a simple tool when its red you have a problem. SMTPViewer scans system alert e-mails for specific keywords or phrases and if matched will raise an alarm of your choice. It can also warn you by e-mail if its urgent like a power failure.